I can say "That repulses me" but can I really say "that artist is
an idiot or incompetent" and call that art criticism? Does art
criticism have some criteria we hold the work against, and if so
who sets this criteria..the public, the artist, the market, the
academic world? or the professional critics? My 'take' is that it
is the intent of the artist that has to set the criteria, because
other criterion move over time, place, and personal taste so much
as to not be reliable and consistent enough to hold in front of
your work and try to paint or create in order to please something
outside yourself.. and is that art? .

I don't think it fair to say an artist is an idiot. [Though there is
the Ashleigh Brilliant quote: "Not all of our artists are playing a
joke on the public. Some are genuinely mad.} To say that someone is
incompetent, yes, that's fair. As someone said earlier, you are
doing the incompetent artist a favor by telling him that his work is
poor and that he needs more training.

Judgment is formed on a basis of one's own background in the medium
under consideration. I have no way of judging whether a piece of
oriental brush lettering is brilliant or ugly. I know virtually
nothing about it and have no basis upon which to form a judgment. On
the other hand, I know a great deal about calligraphy and
illumination. This is the result of many, many years of study and
work and training in the field. I have, therefore, a valuable
resource to draw upon and a basis upon which to form a judgement as
to the skill or lack thereof exhibited in a calligraphy work. I am
competent to make a judgment in this area. There are juried exhibits,
and the jurors are those who have a background in the field they are
judging.

There is an impressionist exhibition on here at the moment and
these paintings have such wide appeal, it is hard not to think that
there is some standard that is generally known and agreed upon that
we all bow to....Where does this standard come from? What is art
criticism?

I suppose the thing that springs to mind here is the trite saying, "I
don't know anything about art, but I know what I like." Everybody
does. There is a generally agreed upon perception of what constitutes
beauty, and this probably changes from one culture to another. Even
the Impressionists, so beloved today, were reviled when the movement
was new. Caravaggio, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Bach, the Pucelle
Brothers, van der Goes, Michaelangelo, The Master of Mary of
Burgundy, Mozart, and on and on - most of us would agree that what
they created was beautiful. I can't say what the standard is for art
in general comes from. I simply don't know. I know the basis for my
standards of beauty in my own field, and I could tell you what they
are. This is a narrow field, though, and you raised the question of
art in general.

I believe it is inevitable that skill comes into the equation. If
there is no perception that the creator or a work is skilled, is the
work seen as beautiful?